Re: Pretest

[Lennart Borgman]

David Kastrup wrote:
> "Juanma Barranquero" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On 11/19/06, Nick Roberts <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm not telling people what to do, or demanding anything.  I'm just
> > > saying that I don't it is appropriate to delay things for further
> > > improvements to emacsclient on Windows.  If you're going to sum up,
> > > at least do it accurately.
> > Lennart is *proposing* changes that would allow emacsclient to
> > automatically start Emacs if it is not running already.
>
> Could anybody summarize what is missing in order to make
>
> emacsclient --alternate-editor "emacs --eval '(server-start)'"
>
> work for this purpose?  That seems simple enough, but I could be
> likely missing some part of the picture.


Perhaps I could answer ;-)

What is missing is something that allows you to just use

   emacsclient -n myfile

without doing any setup whatever, without having to start Emacs before. 
It should in my opinion work right out of the box.

The reason? The threshold is already high to start to use Emacs. For new 
users it is very important to be able to start immediately right after 
installing Emacs. Otherwise a lot of potential user might never start 
using Emacs.

The possibility to do something like the line you propose should still 
be there, but with my patch you should be able to just use

   emacsclient --alternative-editor="whateveryoulike" myfile

instead.

I have previously added similar functionality to gnuclient on w32. I 
have waited for a working emacsclient on w32 so that I could try to 
implement that feature there instead in a platform independent manner. I 
 have done that now - I believe. The code is working on w32 and most of 
it is the same on other platforms. Starting a new process is however 
platform dependent. I think there are three different platform dependent 
ways:

   - fork()
   - CreateProcess() on w32
   - system() -- needs a helper program to avoid wait

To be clear the code is there for all three ways (but it is not yet 
submitted to the CVS). For those that does not want to use the new 
functionality to start Emacs automatically everything will work as before.

When I started to distribute binaries for Emacs on w32 Richard expressed 
that he wanted the official release of Emacs to have all functionality 
it included working on GNU/Linux. My proposal above is not exactly in 
line with that, but rather close. On w32 this functionality actually 
have been available for quite some time now.